Another item to add to my regret list: Never experiencing New York city. I did go there when I was eight-years-old (saw a Broadway play Jelly’s Last Jam) but I never experienced it as an adult or even as a teenager. What I remember about NYC was the cold windiness, unbelievable traffic and huge multi-level book stores.

NYC will always have a special place in my heart because it’s the home of the ancient Wechsler Bellevue intelligence scale (which went on to spawn both the WAIS and the WISC series). For David Wechsler, NYC was America and indeed only New Yorkers were included in the test norms of his original scale (though demographically weighted to reflected the country as a whole). You can still see that New York sense of humor in the cartoons the test asks you to arrange and the general knowledge and social judgments it elicits. When I think of American intelligence, I think of New York and there’s no better place to take the WAIS.

But recently New York’s epitaph was written in a brilliant essay called “NYC is dead forever” by hedge-fund manager James Altucher. So powerful was this essay that if NYC was not already dead, this essay killed it. Here, Glenn Beck reads its haunting words :

However Jerry Seinfeld was having none of it, and blasted Atucher for his doom and gloom.